The Total Stupendousness of Wisconsin

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Jeff Deck

So here we are in Madison, and I just have to share what an amazing event we just had tonight. Unexpected. Unprecedented. But first! Let’s rewind the clock a little bit. Let’s jump back to yesterday morning, when Benjamin and I headed bravely out from Chicago, at 7 am…

… and at 8 am, we could finally put the spires of that lake-nurtured megalopolis behind us and actually reach the open highway. Whew. There are a few too many cars out there going to the same place at the same time.  We had a stop along the way once we crossed into Wisconsin, and so we popped into Milwaukee for a bit to do an interview with the radio program “Lake Effect” (the piece will be airing next week).  It was a great, thoughtful conversation, well worth stopping in Brew City for, though somehow I forgot to mention that old tale I’ve done to death by now with the media about “Milwuakee” Furniture, in the one place where it could have really resonated.

We had a sandwich, or rather, had a sandwich respectively, and then continued on our way to Madison.  We had fond memories of the city from the original typo hunt, both for its independent charm and openness to our mission.  Though Madison seemed itself to have a few more motorists clogging up the roads than last time, the city welcomed us once again.  It was the first hotel of our trip after staying with a series of friends and relatives– our tearful reunion with Econo Lodge.  We didn’t really mind the chance to stretch out a bit for a couple of nights and catch up on some tour tasks that got pushed back during times of craziness.  Across from the hotel, we happened to notice a sign with a missing letter:

Naturally we had to go inside and let them know about the mistake, and, you know, stick around for a while in case they decided to fix it.  And have some chicken.

We were fortunate to have an excellent conflux of Madison media before our event, including a big article in the Wisconsin State Journal, the paper of record in the area.  This continued with a Live at Five local news appearance today, a mere hour and a half before our Borders appearance.  The hosts were exceedingly warm and promoted the reading event itself, so it gave us a good feeling.  But we were still cautious when we walked into that bookstore tonight.  We’d had great media in Chicago before that event as well, but the attendance there had not been large.  And here, we had a grand total of about one person as far as personal connections.

My stomach nearly dropped into my legs when I saw the amount of chairs that had been set up for our event; given our modest audiences in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago, setting up fifty chairs seemed impossibly optimistic.  We were going to let these nice bookstore people down.  I had trouble breathing for a moment.  I checked for a good place to hide.  Jayne, the Borders manager helping us out, explained that they’d been getting a lot of calls about the event, but I still felt the need to retreat into the shelves for a while.

Then Benjamin returned from scouting out the crowd, and the news was good– about a dozen people were sitting there, twenty minutes before the start of the event.  We then watched dumbfounded from our hideout on the first floor of the store as a stream of people came in and ascended the stairs.  We went up too and watched the Borders folks bring out more and more chairs.  They had to resort to grabbing chairs from the break room after a while.  The one person we knew in Madison never showed, but that was all right, because the whole city ended up coming out to see us read.  The official estimate was around 100 people.

That’s right.  Madison just beat D.C. and Benjamin’s hometown of Virginia Beach.  By about 25 people.  Way to go, Mad City… you took us by surprise and set an amazing new watermark!  This speaks very highly of this area’s passion for better spelling and grammar.  Here’s a couple of pictures of our new friends– thanks so much, everyone!


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Brought To You By The Letter L

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Benjamin D. Herson

We arrived in Chicago Sunday night and pretty much immediately collapsed, for we had a busy Monday planned.

The first stop was Mancow.  For two introverts like Jeff and I, book promotion can already feel awkward and unnatural, but I don’t think we’ve ever come so close to feeling like whores as when we were sitting in the chairs outside his studio listening to the on-air product we’d soon be joining.  To my left was a picture of the President of the United States, labeled with the note: “He’s not one of us.”  Meanwhile, we listened to callers arguing about whether a woman in Nevada should abort her baby.  As has been reported by many torture victims, the waiting period before the torture begins is actually the hardest to endure, and after an hour of sitting there listening, we were let in–with the instruction not to touch the desk.  Jeff pointed out the piece of paper with the three talking points Mancow’s producer had printed out for him to recite, in order, while dealing with his caller (e.g.: Where are your maternal instincts?).  Then we talked, and then we were standing around waiting for round two, when it turned out there wasn’t a round two because Mancow had to leave and I guess didn’t want to saddle the guy filling in with…us.

Our next interview, on WGN, went much better as we showed off some typo finds and corrections, highlighting selections from our last trip to Chicago.  Thus, we clearly needed more Chicago typos, and Jeff spied this from across the street:

Hey, we may just be passing through, but as usual, Jeff’s typo detection cannot be stopped.  We went in, made our usual offer to help, and were told that the boss wasn’t in.  He offered that maybe the boss would give us a call and we could fix it tomorrow.  Well, sadly, we’d be gone tomorrow–we really can’t fix this now?  No?  Okay, moving right along.

Also,

Cleaner?  Cleaners?  What’s your pleasure?

After running around on a hot and muggy Chicago summer day, I was thankful for the wind that would occasionally gust into us.  When our third event got postponed until after the book signing, we stumbled into a pub called Firkin & Pheasant and had a delicious late lunch.  Followed by an interview with Lake Shore Magazine and our 10th reading/signing, this time back at Borders, where we were excited about how excited the staff was.  This was a store that knew how to host an event, and we had a great group show up for the fun.

We put on our usual show, and since we were in Chicago, we raffled off a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style‘s new, baby blue, 16th edition.  Then we dashed off for the red line (by this point, we’d become pretty familiar with the L, which had ferried us from point to point throughout the day) to make it to our rescheduled interview with Dr. Milt Rosenberg.  He asked us a lot of thoughtful questions about language, serving as a distinctly interesting counterpoint to the day’s beginning.  I left feeling better about myself as an author-who-must-promote-book.  Jeff, meanwhile, was heartened by this find in the Tribune Tower, pointed out to us by the security officer in the lobby.  Not a typo, but evidence of a typo corrected.

By the time we made it back to my buddy Tim’s place, we’d been out and about in Chicago for almost 18 hours.  Again with the immediate collapse.  Thanks, Chicago.  You were…a wildly oscillating experience.

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Cleaving Through the Land

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jeff Deck

Thursday night, we arrived in the thrumming heart of northeastern Ohio to stay at Benjamin’s friend Pam’s place downtown. We really were spoiled by a deck featuring a view of Lake Erie and the Browns stadium, as well as the food and beverages Pam thoughtfully provided us. Originally we’d left a little extra time in our schedule for Cleveland media, but aside from a couple of interviews in the morning on Friday, we did actually wind up with some occasion to breathe. And that was welcome indeed after many busy weeks.

We did catch one typo in the parking area near where we were staying:

Ha!  After witnessing so many instances of this type of sign on our original typo hunt, wherein people would just not bother to put in an apostrophe (unsure of whether to put it before or after the S, perhaps), here we have an overcorrection, and somehow wound up with two Ss.  S’s?  Eesh.

I will pause only to recommend the magnificent sandwiches at Panini’s– sandwiches that are not, in fact, paninis– before plunging on to recounting our reading on Saturday at the Barnes & Noble in Westlake, west of the city proper.  The store kind of messed up in the preparations for our reading, by which I mean that there were no preparations for our reading, but we helped them get things together.  Our audience was greatly augmented by a bunch of my relatives showing up to support the event.  Here’s a glimpse of the reading:

It ended up being a fairly successful event, with yuks all around– I’m really grateful to everyone who came out!  Afterward I spent some time with my relatives in nearby North Ridgeville, and got more free food.  Score!  My grandmother (and dad) even came out from Erie to see me.

Today my compadre and I reserved for driving from Cleveland to Chicago.  We stopped off in South Bend, Indiana along the way to catch a matinee of Scott Pilgrim, since I’d really enjoyed reading the graphic novels over the past several years.  We were able to use free movie passes that my friend Krystina gave me, so it has really been an excellent time for freebies all in all.  And now, here we are.  Tomorrow will be quite a whirlwind of activity, including chatting with a national radio host and putting on our event at the Borders in Lincoln Park.

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Not Just One River, But Three

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Jeff Deck

On Wednesday I made the foolish decision to drive from Charlottesville, VA to Pittsburgh, PA via the mountains of West Virginia, thinking that since the scenic route was only a few minutes longer on Google Maps, hey, why not?  Hours later, as Benjamin and I looked at each other’s green faces after driving up and down every West Virginian peak in the lower half of the state, sometimes crawling along behind wayward trucks who swept their oblong cargo behind them at hazardous angles, it occurred to me to stick to known routes when there’s any doubt.  The scenery was quite beautiful, though.

We ended up having to stop a few times during this journey to speak with Ireland, Canada, and assorted other English-oriented locales, so that lengthened an already swollen odyssey, and by the time I hit the evening rush hour coming into Pittsburgh, I was about ready to go Grand Theft Auto on my fellow motorists (or Crackdown– that’s the one where you can blow up a lot of vehicles, right?).  Fortunately, Benjamin’s expert navigation and words of wisdom averted any violence, and we arrived at my friend Karrie’s place intact.

During the day Thursday, we didn’t have much opportunity to typo hunt in the ‘Burgh, shuttling from one interview to the next, but I did manage to find yet another mangling of a familiar word:

We’ve seen the H thrown in there before, seen a P or a C dropped, but I think the A instead of U is a new one for me.  This was in a convenience store in an office building not far from the mighty Allegheny.  We went inside and it turned out the woman working there was quite familiar with the error, having noticed it herself and had plenty of customers mention it to her, but she did not feel she had the authority to change her boss’s sign.  Chapter 7, people!  Chapter 7.

Later Benjamin and I walked for a few miles through Pittsburgh, disturbed and saddened by the blighted middle section of the city as we headed down Fifth Avenue.  We did have some interesting views of houses on the hills on the other side of the mighty Monongahela (there, I had an excuse to say Monongahela, I can proceed with this entry).  Our reading that evening would not be downtown, however, but in a Barnes & Noble at the Waterworks Mall a little outside the town proper.

This was another one that, like Charlottesville, made Benjamin and me a little nervous.  Our connections in Pittsburgh were a little thin.  The family I thought I’d had in the area turned out to be imaginary.  And strangely, the signage that Barnes & Noble had received from corporate listed only my name, denying Benjamin’s existence.  That’s a harsh position to take just because Benjamin is a Borders employee.  We began our presentation, or a stripped-down version of it, to a rather small audience.

And then something magical happened– more people started to show up.  By the time we’d run through our little bag of tricks, there were enough people to justify adding a couple more elements for our event, including having a volunteer read with us.  And of course, more elements mean more prizes.  There were some great questions from the audience and excellent enthusiasm.  Pittsburgh, you came through for us.  Here’s a shot of our new friends.

And I guess I’ve got a new piece of art for my living room:

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The Typo Docters Are In

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Benjamin D. Herson

That first couple weeks we were on tour was quite intense, and we fell a little behind.  Thus, out of order entries.  This should be the last of those, as we’ve gradually been catching up…

Philadelphia, the site of our fourth book signing, was exceptionally kind to us.  The city offered up much in the way of platonic, brotherly love.  It also proved to be fertile ground for typo hunting.  We met up with a reporter and photographer from the Philadelphia Inquirer at the giant clothespin, and we wandered down the street and began hunting.  A few blocks down, and we commenced typo finding, or at least Jeff did.  I have to confess something.  While walking around with the New York Post reporter in NYC, I was the only person who failed to spot anything.  Jeff did the work singlehandedly with the ABC News crew in Portsmouth, and I again found nil.  I hadn’t found any typos on signs since our book tour had begun, and we were now two weeks in.  Anyway, Jeff found a sign with heavy trouble.

Before he decided to try correcting this one, it came to a pick-your-battle moment.  Because there was also a stray apostrophe on the tour.  I’d taken over camera duties and of course forgot to snap the before picture, but basically, the sign’s name on the awning and written elsewhere agreed on an apostrophe-free version, but the sticky letters on the door included the apostrophe sticker.  It didn’t belong in Cleaner’s, as the other signs correctly indicated.

We entered with maybe too much theater (the reporter followed us in as the photographer began snapping pictures of everything and everyone–including the clerk as we tried to talk to her), but Jeff managed to gently wheedle permission to remove the sticker.

Great, and down the street a couple of storefronts, here came another.

Hmm…  Batting today, number 5, Billy Hairstylist?  We went inside, where we quickly explained ourselves.  Thus, we managed to provide our reporter with a classic response to our typo hunting efforts.  One of the women there explained that she wasn’t the boss and she didn’t want to make any decisions on the boss’s behalf.  Jeff offered to not only fix it, but make the fix look good (He’s really improved in this part of the craft.), but to no avail.

We walked on, and I thought I caught one, but it turned out to be the name of the place, so it falls under artistic license.  In which case, I have to give the store props for including the apostrophe when naming the place (even though I don’t get the significance of using a Z there).

Blast–I still hadn’t contributed.  Jeff chatted more with the reporter as I examined the area near the awning where I’d thought I’d finally caught a typo.  There’s wasn’t much more text for me to examine while standing around…but there was enough.  What the…?

Ha!  I found one!  I found one!  Trapped behind the glass at a place that was for rent and so had no one inside to let us in.  So…no correction on that one, sadly.  But I found one.

What we really needed, though, was something else to correct.  We finally left the block with all of those typos and marched on.  Then Jeff found a classic word butchering…or rather, a word that’s often butchered, but the mistake wasn’t where we’d found it before.

We charged inside, where we were greeted by a trio of girls, and they sang sweeter than the sirens when Jeff asked if he could correct a mistake.  Of course he could, no problem.  Not one of them saw any problem with that.  They’d spelled the same word correctly everywhere else, and they were happy to see this error eliminated from their sidewalk specials board.  Jeff didn’t even have the chance to produce his own piece of chalk as one of the girls offered him a stick.  And so…

A passing filly who noticed us looking proudly at a job well done and thought we were considering where to eat informed us that they had great sandwiches–it’s one of the best spots around.   Based on our own observations, we couldn’t help but agree.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from typo hunting is that you can’t stop.  You may say something casually ridiculous like, “All right, I think that’s good–let’s head back.”  And you can mean to stop, but then something like this will pounce on you.

Oh, it gets worse.

This was at the Dress Barn, and we didn’t bother going in once we saw the second one.  That looked professionally done, which means we need to pull the Filene’s Basement stunt and check a second Dress Barn.  If anyone else visits a Dress Barn in the coming days, could you keep an eye out for this?  We haven’t come across another one yet to confirm the trouble.

Even after we left the city proper and returned to our friend’s place in Lansdowne, Jeff still had his typo radar going.  This one’s kinda hilarious–but you know we don’t touch government signs, no no.

We dropped south to the Philadelphia Airport that afternoon and had a wonderful time talking with people and signing books for them.  I even ran into an old friend from my college days who was randomly passing through (this would happen again at our next airport).

The big signing happened the next day at the Borders downtown.  Thanks to everyone getting the word out, including the Philadelphia Inquirer story that ran, we ended up just filling the area, more people trickling in after we began.  We started with hardly more than 10 people and ended with more than 20.  Here’s a couple of pictures we took in the middle of the event.


Thanks to everyone who came out (and up) to the show!  We continue to hear that everyone loves how different it is from a normal reading, and we have plenty more prizes to give away.

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“Charlottesville” Is Correct

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Benjamin D. Herson

Prior to our event in Charlottesville, I decided to send out a little tweet.  (Yes, I have recently become yet another twit.)  Unfortunately, I’d botched something.  The red squiggles indicated I’d misspelled the word Charlottesville.  I stared at it for a moment.  Before I could even start adding or deleting letters–the way you do when you get those squiggles and figure you must have just gotten this or that little thing wrong so you change it to see if the squiggles go away–I realized that I didn’t even know what to change.  So I asked the human spell-checker, also known as Jeff Deck, the founder of TEAL, to spell the city we were currently in.  He spelled it and it checked out.  TweetDeck simply didn’t recognize it, hadn’t listed it in their lexicon of proper nouns.  It bothered me that I’d actually stared at it wondering what I’d gotten wrong, that the fact that I couldn’t even guess what to change hadn’t made me shout back at the screen, “I defy you, villain!  I know better!”

Onwards to the event, which was at New Dominion in the downtown area, and what a blast it was.  The event space was up overlooking the rest of the store at the back, with all sorts of interesting artwork on the walls.  Not having as many contacts here, we weren’t sure what to expect, but people began trickling in about fifteen minutes before the event began.  We asked some of them how they had heard about the event, and every person or group seemed to have a different answer.   Nice work getting the word out, Charlottesville.

Two minutes prior to start time, we’d filled the seats and even sent one attendee to the staircase (she kindly volunteered to take the picture just below).

We were doing our first lunch hour signing, so we decided to pare down our usual show to some essentials.  It’s rare that I’ll say this, but I wish the Q&A could have gone on about twice or thrice as long.  I wanted to answer the first question with a short essay, and I’m sure there were more good questions waiting to be flung our way.  We also managed to sell out New Dominion’s stock.

One of the attendees also sent us out on a mission to a movie theater.  We thought we’d found the typo.  DONT LOOK BACK, a Bob Dylan documentary from 1967, was playing.  Ah-ha!  No apostrophe!  Except…then we noticed the poster hanging below the marquee.  The poster had it the same way.  Was that really how the film was listed?  Apparently so.  The writer/director seemed to feel he was simplifying the language.  After looking at the poster, I can’t help but think he just liked the look of the block of text, three four-letter words stacked on top of each other.  In any event, the theater had correctly listed their film.  On another side of the same marquee we noticed “CHARLO TESVILLE” but again declined to consider it a typo.  These guys hadn’t been confused by a spell check or anything like that.  They’d had it right.  There was a space for the letter T that had probably just fallen down.

On a nearby chalkboard I spied yet another thing I thought was a typo: frites instead of fries.  No, they were just being French.  We’d heard many “that’s the Spanish way of spelling it” or “that’s how they spelled it back then” excuses for typos on the trip, but only here and now did it actually apply.  That actually IS the French word, which is what they’d been aiming for.

Charlottesville seemed to have things well in hand, but we still had a few minutes before being charged for another hour in the parking garage, so we ducked in a couple more places.  That’s when we saw this:

We asked the girl behind the counter if we could correct it, but she deferred to a boss who wasn’t present at the time.  That’s when Jeff noticed that there were many copies of the same sign all over the store…but not all of them had the error.  Out of four we looked at, two did and two didn’t.  I have a theory that someone has already corrected the saved file for this sign that they pop up everywhere around the store.   They just need to flush out the old ones and replace them with the new.  Nothing for us to do.

One last stop, at an awesome little art store.  Right beside the counter, I spied this:

We asked the clerk there to let us draw a tiny apostrophe in, but he felt he’d be remiss in his obligation to the sign-maker if he allowed us to alter it in any way.  It suddenly occurred to me there’s a ridiculous difference between the first hunt, nearly two and a half years ago, and any hunting we do on this one, post-book.  In a moment like this, I can’t help but think “chapter seven” to myself.  Certainly there was a repetition of some basic responses as we traveled, and we learned to identify them along the way, but now that we’ve written the book, I’m also considering that “Hey! We already covered this!”  Not only observed the pattern, but commented on it, analyzed it while researching for and writing the book.

Suffice it to say, we were a bit disappointed to end it there, blocked from an easy fix that was the only solid opportunity to make a difference in the pretty presentable Charlottesville textual landscape.  Then again, he did promise to ask, and if he does, I won’t be surprised if the sign-creator says, “Oh yeah, of course.”  That in fact, he’d be shocked to learn that the clerk hadn’t felt comfortable with us taking care of it right then.

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The Hub of the Universe

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Jeff Deck

Going into our Boston reading event, the third in our epic series, I found myself hoping for a good turnout on what had been until very recently my home turf. Portsmouth had been excellent– could I bring out just as good a crowd in the area I’d occupied for four years?  Benjamin might give me a stern look if we had a few unfilled seats, and I feared that stern look.

It turned out even better than I could have hoped for.  We must have had over fifty people, not just filling the seats but flowing out into the aisles.  My friends really came through for me and showed up in great quantities, and even my old boss came out to show her support.  Benjamin had some relatives in the crowd, and a few other people he knew.  And of course there also were just a bunch of Bostonians who cared about better spelling and grammar!

Another fantastic event thanks to Borders.  They were a big help in getting our first raffle underway, distributing tickets to everyone for our drawing of a copy of the brand new, 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.  My friend Krystina ended up winning the Manual– while in the meantime, her husband James won one of the Typo Correction Kits in our Preorder Giveaway.  Lucky couple!

Here’s a few pictures from the event.

Afterward, a bunch of my friends and I headed out for some celebratory food and drinks, which was nice.  As I parted with them in front of the Copley station stop, I noticed a sign with a bit of a problem, as Boston’s little sendoff to the League:

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Back At The Beach

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Benjamin D. Herson

Those weren’t typos–that’s just how my handwriting looks.  At least, that’s the story I’m sticking with, especially after today’s reading, which had us signing for nearly an hour straight.  Today we visited the Borders in Virginia Beach, the very store I’d been working at until the month prior to being picked up by Jeff on his original typo hunting road trip of 2008.  The seating area had already filled when we began the reading…

…and the place just kept filling up as the event continued.


Being back in my hometown for a reading was a wonderful experience, mostly because people from all points in the first two-thirds of my life showed up.  Scouts from my troop and staff from the summer camp I’d worked at, teachers from preschool and every grade from 6th through 12th, local Dartmouth guys–including a pair who’d interviewed me when I’d still been in high school hoping to attend, friends from work (some who were punched in), friends from school (thanks for letting me put you to work, Mat), and many, many more.  I confess I might have frozen up while personalizing a few books for high school friends as it felt a little bit like yearbook signing–it’s hard to condense a block of memories from years ago into a thoughtful yet witty bon mot.  To everyone who made it, both old friends and new, both Jeff and I deeply appreciate it.  Aside from some minor issues with the raffle, I’d say a fun time was had by all.

I should note that once again I heard a lot of people express surprise that the book signing was so much more than just the old reading-questions-signing.  Jeff and I really wanted to make sure we put together a show that would be entertaining and fun and perhaps even a little informative.  Book signings don’t have to be stale, and thanks to everyone who’s come to our East Coast events, there’s been a hearty helping of laughs and…why, just a goodly portion of general joviality indeed.

Thank you to the East Coast for a wonderful first six events.  Now we’ll be bounding off the beach, deflecting from our course due south to a northwesterly heading through Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Madison.  More typo hunting and book touring is still to come, so stay with us…

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The Old Port

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Jeff Deck

Speaking of missing stories– I’ll bet you’d like to know a little more about the Portsmouth typo hunt that we did with ABC World News, wouldn’t you? The piece that aired didn’t exactly show much of the hunt.

This was the day of our Portsmouth reading, August 12, and we’d only just nailed down the arrangements the night before. Benjamin and I were struck by the fear that, within the narrow timeframe that we’d have with ABC, we wouldn’t actually be able to locate the typos that we knew were lurking somewhere in my town, so we did a little prescouting that morning.  Is that cheating?  Maybe a little.  But when the crew arrived a couple of hours later, we were able to take them right to the troublesome spots and attempt to get them corrected.

In case you’ve never been to Portsmouth, it really is the jewel of New Hampshire’s little coast, a beautiful town with a thriving arts scene and many independent businesses.  I’m so glad to be living there with Jane, and I miss both girlfriend and town right now, but before I get too wistful, I’ll just roll on to describing our hunt.  The first typo was one that we hadn’t scouted out beforehand, in fact– I just noticed it while being obliged to stare at the same window for a good ten minutes while the cameraman got some posed shots.  Eventually an error swam out of the sea of text, trailing a vile trail behind it:

We went inside to alert the real estate agent at the counter, and she took our observation in good humor and promised to see to the error.  Our own corrective tools would not have been kind to the laminated sign.

Our next typo find happened at the popular pizzeria downtown, Flatbread.  Whenever guests come into town, Jane and I invariably take them to eat at Flatbread, and we’d had a few people visit this summer, so I’d had prior opportunities to take note of a typo just inside the front door:

I was apprehensive about pointing this typo out to the staff.  There wasn’t any way we could easily fix it for them, and what if they got angry that we’d brought it up, and sabotaged my next pizza order?  They might put the nitrates back in their famous nitrate-free pepperoni and mushroom pie, just to revenge themselves upon me.

My fears were put to rest, however, when we talked with the manager and his reaction was both amused and favorable.  He explained that a local artist had made the signs and thus he’d have to consult with the artist about making an amendment.  He even had the beginnings of an idea for fixing the spelling, by making the s into an e and perhaps wiping out the leftmost painted tomato to make room for the new s.  So cheers to you, Flatbread.

And speaking of cheer, we headed next down Bow Street and off that street onto Ceres, home to an array of dockside shops and eateries.  Here Benjamin and I had noticed a small error in the window of Annabelle’s, an ice cream shop currently looking for help:

When we ventured inside the shop, the girls at the counter listened to our observation and gave the go-ahead for us to fix the typo, without a moment of hesitation (or if the moment had existed, it must have occurred during the ABC producer’s quick preconference).  We discovered that the sign was not a dry-erase board, as it had first appeared, but rather regular marker on a papered-over corkboard.  Thus wiping away the offending letter would not be as simple a matter as it’d first appeared.  No matter, a dash of corrective elixir would prime the board for the correction.

Pretty good result, and keep that number in mind if you’re on the coast and are handy with an ice-cream scoop.

Finally, heading back up the Bow incline, Benjamin and I directed the TV crew’s attention to an inconsistency we’d spotted in the name of a favorite hangout for Portsmouth wharf rats and deckhands.  Most of the signage at the street entrance read “Harpoon Willy’s”, but there was one sign that had forgot something:

We descended the wooden stairs down to where the restaurant/bar held court on the Piscataqua, and asked the manager if we could add the apostrophe to their sign.  She gave us a flat stare and said, “No, you can’t.”

Such immovable dismissal was not unknown to us, and we looked at each other and began to back off.  But then the manager laughed and said, “Just kidding, of course you can!  This is Harpoon Willy’s– there are no rules!”

Not only a willingness to fix mistakes, but humor as well?  I think I have a new favorite spot along the river.  The manager may have been aware of the benefit of favorably responding to us, given the national news crew at our heels, but hey, points for savvy.  We clomped back up the stairs and set to work on the sign.


And that concluded our whirlwind tour of Portsmouth’s typos, suggesting from our small data sample that the town is relatively free of error, and that when mistakes do occur, people are highly likely to be willing to address the mistakes.  I’m proud of the reactions in my new home.  Maybe for the next hunt in the neighborhood, there’ll be enough time to pop over the water into Kittery and finally confront that missing apostrophe in the Warren’s Lobster House sign… “The Seacoasts Finest Salad Bar” isn’t going to cut it.

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In High Sprits!

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Benjamin D. Herson

(We’ve fallen a little behind in keeping up with the adventures unfolding here day-by-day, but until we’ve caught back up, just pretend you already know about the fascinating and wonderful events that took place on the previous days.)

Up early once again, Jeff and I departed Philly at 5am Wednesday morning so that we could make a signing at BWI at 8am. On the shuttle bus from the parking garage, we ran into an old college friend who’d already bought our book. He’d gotten the Kindle version, and this gave us the opportunity to look into the rumor of a special typo that appeared in the electronic version only. See for yourself:

I had to confirm for myself with one of the books we would momentarily be signing and sending into the friendly skies with someone, but sure enough, that was NOT in the print version. I wondered how that had happened, and if anyone can explain, please enlighten me. Anyway, we sold a handful of books and headed on to DC proper. We parked at my buddy Tony’s in Silver Spring and rode a bus to the metro.

We’re typo hunting again, though these days we seem to only make it out when someone prompts us to do so in order to observe us at work. For the fourth time this month, we typo hunted with an observer, this time from the Washington Post, who then wrote a wonderful article.  We met up at Dupont Circle, and from there we took the area spoke by spoke, starting southbound so that Jeff could point out his mansion-like former office building.  Before we made it there, Jeff spotted one.

A woman inside noticed us standing there and pointing at the sign, and after we began pulling out cameras for a major photo shoot outside her door, she decided to see why her storefront had become such a popular backdrop.  Jeff pointed out the error, and she politely declined our offer to fix it.  Thus, we got to introduce our journalistic shadow to the “I’ll fix it later” line, though at least this woman seemed sincere.  In fact, she pointed back to some other signs within the store.  I thought maybe she was going to offer another typo, but she then asked if we did lamination.  Ah, she thought we were sign people, that we’d pointed out this typo as a way of getting our foot in the door; in this economy, people are using whatever angle they can find.  We (I hope) cleared up the confusion and moved on.

After a distracted bit of typo hunting while answering questions on the go, we finally headed north from the circle and found a few more items.  I confess that for our New York and New Hampshire typo hunts I was utterly useless as a typo hunter, being a bit rustier than Jeff.  I redeemed myself somewhat in Philly, but this time I really dove in.  We went into a store, and I noticed a slight inconsistency.


Unfortunately, my zeal at my suddenly returned powers overcame me in the moment, and as Jeff was trying to convince the man behind the counter to let us fix it, I had to go and point out another find, this one a classic.

Whoops.  Sometimes you have to pick your battles.  It’s one thing to ask someone to fix a mistake, but now we were finding them everywhere, and he probably felt a little overwhelmed.  ”We’ll look into it.”  Another standard “go away” line.  Well, we’d shown our typo-hunting neophyte how easy they were to find, but now it would be nice if we could get a correction.

We did so just a little up the road.  We inspected the chalkboard as we approached, and it checked out, but when we came around to the other side, something wasn’t quite right.

Jeff led the way inside, where a man greeted us, and Jeff explained what he’d found.  Right away, the man took responsibility for the mistake, adding that he’s been fasting recently.  Yes, working at a restaurant when you can’t eat until the sun sets for a month might, I agree, make it difficult to concentrate from time to time.  We assured him that everyone else was still making mistakes right along with him, explained our mission, and brought him to the sign.  He didn’t just want us to fix it.  Recognizing Jeff’s talent as he transformed the tail of an a into the curve of a newborn p, the man requested Jeff’s artistic assistance in adding a little extra something to the sign, maybe an illustration.  This is what he got.

Oh yeah.  I found myself wishing that Jeff had been offering little illustrations with every typo correction all along.

Second Story Books had carts of discount books outside, and I was drawn to them like a magnet.  As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one, and after finding a couple good reads on the 50 cent cart, the reporter offered to buy us a book or two.  I’d spotted a copy of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and since I’d been meaning to read another book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I accepted the offer.  We went inside, and while she paid, the reporter mentioned our mission.  The employees first sought clarification on where we were searching for them–not within the books, scanning endless texts, right?

Right.  In signs and such.

Oh, okay.

They seemed to think it was odd, but not completely without merit, which we took as an invitation.  I ducked into the history section and found one our travel writer would appreciate.

And we’d just been talking about double-letter confusion.  Ta-da!  Unfortunately, we couldn’t see a simple fix of this one, and an employee indicated that it wouldn’t be too difficult to simply replace.  When, upon departing, the reporter asked him if he was really going to get it fixed, the employee seemed almost hurt as he replied, “Of course!”  Bookstore people, I explained, were usually pretty good about getting typos fixed (and yes, I recognize I’m deeply biased).  The sky opened briefly, pouring just long and hard enough to help Jeff and I show off our drowned rat impersonation.  We parted ways with the reporter and headed back home.

Thursday morning we did an interview with ABC News Now, and then a few more call-in things as we roamed about town and tried to catch up on other work.  Like, you know, the blog that had gone six days without a post somehow.  Then we had our book signing at Borders on 18th & L.  It was packed.  The seating area was filled, with an arc of those standing to define the event space.  This, by the way, is the store that hired me almost 8 years ago to the day, and being there to do a book signing made it all the more spectacular.



(Second photo courtesy of MalnurturedSnay)

Jeff and I put on the show we’ve continued to perfect.  As usual we called up volunteers, did a little reading from the book, helped those in the audience become more aware of where they fall on the spectrum of linguistic philosophy, and then we had ourselves a raffle for a copy of the new, baby blue, 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.  (We don’t do that last one at every reading, but there are always some prizes, so if we’re coming to a bookstore near you, I just want you to be aware that prizes are involved.)   Then we signed until my Sharpie went dry (okay, I’ve used the same one for a few years now) and headed across the street for celebratory drinks.  Yet another wonderful event, probably the best one yet, actually.  I want to send a special thanks out to everyone who came, and an extra special thanks to those of you who told me it was the best book signing you’d ever been to.  That’s what inflated my head so big that I couldn’t get through the door, and since I was trapped inside, I figured I might as well sit down and finally write a blog entry.

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